


Forget Me Not

by CommanderInChief



Category: Holby City
Genre: Angst, F/F, Familial Alzheimer's Disease, Friends to Lovers, Slow Burn, TW: suicidal thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-10
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-08-07 23:54:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 13,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7734748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CommanderInChief/pseuds/CommanderInChief
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clusters of flowers, the colour of the sky at midday, suspended on wire-thin green stalks.<br/>Serena recognised the plant at once.<br/>Myosotis.<br/>Commonly known as forget-me-nots.<br/>And obviously bloody hilarious for whatever sick bastard decided they belonged in a dementia support waiting room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One - Serena

One.

Two.

Three.

Serena counted the heart beats.

One.

Two.

Her own gloved fingers hovered over the tear. Blood, shiny as a ripe plum, pooled from the laceration in the– in the–

One.

Something caught her wrist. Another pair of hands. Yellow. Gloved. Warm like the body on the table.

“Ms Campbell?”

She blinked. The blood kept coming.

“Serena… Do you need me to take over?” The voice came quiet enough for Serena to pretend she hadn’t heard, deliberate enough that she knew Bernie would know exactly what she was doing if she did.

Meanwhile, the incision, a gaping hole in her patient’s ribcage was deep with blood. Blood. In her ears, on her fingers, throbbing through her chest, everywhere, blood. Like rust and earth and rotting, she tasted it. Thicker than air, it was heavy, a cloud crawling down her throat.

_ She was suffocating. _

“I… ummm…. I’m going to take five… Ms Wolfe, if you could complete, please, it would be most appreciated.” 

Hands barely free of the weight of metal and latex and red, Serena turned and ran. The on-call room was close but the surgical sinks closer and then her nails were clawing at her own skin under water so hot it burned cold until her entire arm was pink, numb.

From there, she had a heart-beat’s grace before she felt the chunks of foul vomit rise up her oesophagus. Knuckles like chalk on the rim of the dark metal trough, she shook as it forced it’s way out of her body.

“Fuck,” In the mirror, she watched the woman in the mirror form the sound.

She’d always been pale but now, her skin was tissue paper, creased and translucent, clownish next to the garishly vibrant shades of her make-up like a yellowing mannequin painted for the occasion.

Long story short, she looked like a woman who needed a drink. 

…

By some divine intervention or another, the rest of her shift went by quickly and, a two-hour long flurry of discharges, meds reviews and a token ‘foreign object somewhere it really shouldn’t be’ patient later, Serena was free to go home.

Upon arrival, the front door had just slammed when she had the customary foghorn of a greeting thrown at her from somewhere on the second floor

“Aunty Serena!”

“Yes,” Gripping the strap of her bag, she managed a smile “Hello Jason. How was your day with oh…? What’s she called…”

Her nephew appeared at the top of the landing, beaming “It went fine, thanks; she said that she really liked my tie!”

As tempting as it was to make a remark about the ‘blooming romance of the century’, Serena  _ really  _ wasn’t in the mood for another attempt at explaining the logic behind good old fashioned sarcasm “Yes? Well, that sounds… Lovely. Did you go to the butterfly sanctuary again?”

If it were possible, his grin widened “Yes, and she loved it. She said that she’d get married there if ever she wanted to marry someone.”

Eyes unblinking and limp smile nowhere to be seen, her whole face slipped. There it was, the feeling she couldn’t name. The feeling she’d had watching Eleanor texting boys or trying make-up or throwing college pamphlets in her face.

The feeling of being left behind.

She’d expected it of Eleanor, looked forward to it almost: the peace and the quiet and the freedom.

But Jason was different. Jason who she woke up with a cup of tea every morning before work. Jason who’d never gone more than a month without turning up the ward. Jason who, in a funny way, was always supposed to have been forever.

She swallowed.

Funny how things changed

“Right… Yes, well…” She attempted, in an elaborate race of verbal hurdles – every time she started to get into a run, she found herself tripping over her own tongue, falling back on her arse. In the end, what she managed was “Gosh… She’s very… Forward, isn’t she?”

It earned her a laugh from Jason, at least “You said that last time as well.”

“…Did I?” It was the first Serena had heard of it – but after her day, she didn’t have the energy to argue “Well, it’s very important that you take things one step at a time in a relationship, that way you each know exactly what the other wants.”

“Like you and Bernie?”

For once, the topic of her relationship with a certain consultant was almost welcome.

“Except me and Bernie are friends, Jason.”

He nodded and, for a second, one moment of glorious optimism, she thought that he might have actually taken in a word that she’d said.

“That’s what they all say, in the films, before they start kissing.”

With a gentle but audible sigh, Serena made a mental note to start mentoring his access to her collection of mindless rom-coms before he started planning Holby general’s first gay wedding - or his own, for that matter.

…

A Tuesday morning, when all the drunks had gone home, the pensioners hadn’t been coaxed out of bed yet and the roads were miraculously accident-free, the beginning of Serena’s next shift should’ve been an easy one – or a slow one, at least.

And perhaps it would’ve been, if it weren’t for the other half of the AAU management jumping at down her throat within seconds of closing the office door.

“Ah, there you are. I was looking for you last night,” Bernie diverted her attention from her tablet long enough to take a long hard look at her colleague. Obviously not getting the reaction she’d expected she continued “No one’d seen you for the latter half of your shift – where were you?”

“Treating patients,” replied Serena without missing a beat “A novelty around here with all the new paperwork regulations, I know,”

The blonde looked at her like she’d just claimed that Jac Naylor was giving out sweets to the kids on paediatrics.

“Don’t try that one with me. I looked for you myself the minute I got out of theatre. Wherever you were, it wasn’t the AAU.”

“Well I wouldn’t have been after you got out of theatre! That was a three-hour operation,” Her became high and thin “My shift ended at five, thank you very much!”

Bernie’s eyebrows drew together as she studied her like the daily crossword.

“But your shift ended at half nine, you made the rota adjustments yourself. Apparently, and this is your words not mine, there ‘wasn’t any sense’ in working the morning when we already had me and Raf…” She paused for breath “Serena… Is everything al-”

“Peachy,” Serena cut her off in a slow, gritty tone that was used to being listened to. Obeyed.

Brave, or perhaps bored of having her head very much attached to it’s cervical vertebrae, Bernie didn’t think before coming back with her reply.

“Then what happened yesterday? You’ve been acting odd for weeks and then you go and freeze in the middle of a surgery that we both know you could perform with your eyes closed. I’m not blind, Serena, I know you. I’m worried.”

Her eyes were big and expression soft and, had they been in the kind of film that only airs at three in the morning for daft old cat ladies and people in A&E waiting rooms, she might’ve taken her hand, traced her thumb over her knuckles and brushed the skin with her lips as tenderly as if it’d shatter from anything more.

Then one of them, Serena couldn’t remember which, looked away.

The moment passed.

“Then you’ll know to stay out of my private life, thank you, Ms Wolfe.”

A month ago, that would’ve been it. Another turn in their cycle from a friendship with the intensity of a love affair back to rivals.

But today, Bernie rose from her chair, clipboard in hand “Your shift ends at six – I’ll be waiting in Albie’s,” She quirked her head to one side, a section of hair slightly lighter than gold cascading down from where it’d been tucked behind her ear “I’m not letting this drop.”

Serena wasn’t about to give her the last word that easy.

“Care to explain why that requires kidnapping  _ my  _ patient’s private observation file?”

“Ward rounds… Via Pulses if you’re interested?”

“You must think you’re so clever.”

The blonde shrugged.

“Well you’re still talking to me… Do you want a coffee or not?”

She could almost hear the second that Serena cracked.

“Full fat latte… And a cinnamon swirl if they’ve got any left?”

“Whatever the lady wants.”

She gave out one of those infuriating little winks before slinking out of the doorway, leaving Serena to realise just how closely she had her under her thumb.

And the worst thing was that  _ Bernie bloody knew it. _


	2. Chapter 2

 

“So, can we get a EMG, EOG, CAT scan and bloods, please, Fletch.”

“EOG, do you mean an EEG, electroencephalogram?”

“Oh, you know  _ exactly  _ what I mean – now can you please get on and  _ do it _ ?” Said Serena, handing the file over to Fletch. Her patient was the stereotypical AAU frequent flyer, complete with illusive symptoms for a disorder that, no doubt, Bernie would conveniently happen to know  _ everything about  _ and a pale, doughy face like a block of sunken cheese.

Cheese like they put on pizza. What was it called? It had a name. She could almost _ feel  _ it hiding away in some smug little crevice of her brain.

_ Cheese that goes on pizza… Cheese that goes on pizza… _

“Aren’t you going to answer that?”

She flinched, glancing up to find Fletch looking expectantly at her handbag. It was buzzing.

“Ah, yes, sorry, must be a reminder…” She dug through her bag, cursing herself for not organising it earlier.

_ Did she really need three different impulse sticks at any one time? She’d smell like an airport duty-free at this rate. _

“Found it… Right… Ah!” Her expression was almost triumphant “According to this… I’m not supposed to be here. Drinks with Bernie, almost forgot. Cheerio boys, don’t take this the wrong way but I’m out of here. Fletch, if you could –“

Before he’d have time to protest, Serena hauled her back over her shoulder, waving them an insincere goodnight.

…

For the most part, Albie’s was noisy, busy and chock-a-block with all the people that she’d spent half her shift trying to avoid – but the Shiraz was good and, at the end of a shift, the slightly sticky wooden doors and flat carpets, unchanged for as long as she’d worked at Holby, were oddly reassuring.

She found Bernie hidden away in the corner at a tiny table no bigger than a drink tray. The little alcove seemed like an odd choice, sandwiched between a yellowing window and a speaker but, before she could comment, Bernie was sliding a fat glass of grape-red wine across the table, smiling as she drummed her palm on the vacant seat.

“Ah, Serena! I take it that you’re still alive then, paperwork hasn’t finished you off?”

“Not quite. Although, we did have Sidney Jones back in, if you remember the bloke that spent his entire day lecturing us on the benefits of his six Porches over his neighbour’s humble Jaguar?”

“I think I’m beginning to. I’ll take it he hasn’t changed then?”

“No,” Serena put her glass back on the table, it was already half empty. If Bernie noticed, she didn’t say anything “Honestly, I think that if that man had his metaphorical stick wedged any further up his arse, he’d be a unicorn.”

Bernie sniggered mid-sip, tipping the glass back too far. A handful of bubbles rose to the surface of her drink as she exhaled, gin and tonic going up her nose.

“I can’t take you anywhere!”

Standing now, with the lower half of her face buried in a scrunched up ball of black napkin, Bernie’s response came in the form of an assertive sniff.

“Oh, for goodness sake- “

Serena came up behind her, holding the handful of tissue in place where Bernie had started to struggle.

“Blow out through your nose… Honestly… I feel like I’m talking to four-year-old Eleanor again.”

Last time she’d been in her current position; her daughter had managed to lodge a finger of orange root vegetable half way up her nasal cavity because she ‘ _ wanted to know what it smelt like’ _ .

God-knows how many years later and the pose hadn’t become any more dignified.

From where she was stood, she could  _ feel  _ Bernie’s ribs move up and out as her diaphragm expanded and contracted in short, swallow bursts.

_ She wasn’t choking; she was giggling. _

By now, half of Albie’s would be staring; she’d heard the rumours: snogging in the on-call room, coping off in Bernie’s ridiculous car, inappropriate use to test tubes to –“

No – she  _ really  _ wasn’t about to go there.

If the sensation blood and sweat collecting on either side of the sticky hot skin on the back of her neck was anything to go by, she’d be pink enough already.

She felt Bernie exhale slowly, perhaps realising a minute after Serena did the position they’d been caught in, red-handed as a toddler with biscuit crumbs around their mouth, three fingers still inside the jar.

And yet, for the time it took for Raf and Fletch to share raised eyebrows on the other side of the bar, either of them moved.

Then, mumbling a quiet ‘sorry’, Serena tried backing away, only to find herself trapped in the triangle where two walls met.

It was a candour left unreciprocated by her blonde colleague who, of course, just  _ had  _ to be softer than she looked through that thin little blouse. Soft and warm in the worst possible way.    

“Look, could you-“ She looked down, away. Somehow that godforsaken woman managed to make the little wisps of blonde-white hair on the back of her neck look indecent “As lovely as your back-end if, I am being rather squashed here.”

“Well, consider me offended.”

Eventually, Bernie turned around.

Serena’s little spark of light relief was short-lived when she realised that the blonde had no intention of actually moving away. Gritting her jaw until she could almost taste her own, ground-up teeth, she kept her gaze down, focusing on a little slither of colour print somewhere in the chaos of Bernie’s bag.

“Leopard print,” She remarked with a light titter, as if it were the conventional response to feeling your best-friend’s breath condensate on your top lip “I see I’ve finally managed to get you into it.”

Smiling, Bernie looked at her, index finger in the air as if to say ‘ _ wait for it _ ’.

It was far too long later when she finally stepped back to reach into her bag.

“Sit down and I’ll show you.”

On the verge of remarking that the woman was acting as if she had an engagement ring tucked away in there, Serena did as she was told, watching as Bernie extracted whatever it was from her bag and lay it flat on the table.

The pattern, she realised, was actually a cover, wrapping around about an inch of a paper in a- in a-

“It’s an organiser, thought it might help save you from the perils of NHS scheduling.”

_ Organiser _ , that was it.

“Go on then, open it.”

Serena show her a cautionary glare, fingers barely touching the front cover.

“I swear, if something jumps out at me-”

“Only one way to find out.”

Not entirely  _ filled _ with confidence, she flipped over the front page, retracting her hand the moment it tipped over half-way, half expecting to find something crawling out from the spine.

She waited

_ Three... _

_ Two… _

_ One… _

Nothing.

Feeling her face fall, Serena still hadn’t decided if she was relieved or, in funny way, disappointed when her eyes settled on a random page.

What she’d first assumed to be a strange, slanting watermark focused into loops of handwriting, penned in glittery brown ink. Almost involuntarily, she flipped through the next pages, finding dates and shift patterns and meal rotas penned in a suspiciously elegant hand, worlds away from the barely legible scrawl she was used to deciphering.

“I only did the first week – and I had to call Jason for some of it. He assured me you wouldn’t mind…”

Serena looked up to find Bernie hunched over the table, studying her reaction as if she really had presented her with a diamond ring and something, somewhere, slipped.

“You really care, don’t you?”

The weight of her words curdled quickly in the light atmosphere of a pub designed for pissed F1’s, not sad middle-aged consultants with a bad Shiraz habit and an affinity for romantic fantasies with all the wrong people.

Bernie just stared and, for one glorious moment, Serena thought she hadn’t heard.

“Of course I care… You’re the best friend I have.”

Serena grinned too quickly, eyes settling on her own reflection in the deep purple surface of her Shiraz between quick glances up at the woman across the table, who seemed to be doing exactly the same.

Looking back, she wouldn’t remember the eventual comeback, nor Bernie’s response but how, in those seconds, her eyes had shimmered, immediately followed by that funny, tingling sensation of wanting something, wholeheartedly wanting something, for the first time since she was six years old, barely remembering to breathe as she tore cheap red-and-green paper away from a pink, plastic, stethoscope and nothing else in the whole, wide world had mattered.


	3. Chapter 3

_ Appt. W/ Hanssen – 10:45 _

From her place in the otherwise empty office, Serena traced the line of lopsided letters with the side of her finger. Black ink came away with her touch, only serving to make her dark, spider-like words appear all the more juvenile against the elegant loops and falls of Bernie’s pen. It must’ve been scrawled in recently, she decided, probably in the tangled mess of admin and caffeine that was her ten-minute break between discharges and observation rounds.

Behind her, the door handle began to rattle, followed by the sound of metal against metal as the intruder resulted to brute force alone. Then, finally, a sheepish knock.

Bernie.

“Pull the handle down and push inwards.”

Another crash on the lock, fiercer than the first and Serena started to wonder how she’d explain it maintenance when the thing eventually burst.

“Can you learn to open a door please!”

In hindsight, she wasn’t certain why she’s flipped her organiser put before opening the door – only that, by the time Bernie stepped through, it was safely concealed underneath a thin spread of paperwork.

“Didn’t you have doors back in Bosnia or wherever it was?”

A paper coffee cup in each hand, Bernie took her usual place perched on the edge of Serena’s desk.

“No – but we were awfully good with untangling a pair of tent flaps.”

“And I suppose that you’re about to suggest that we replace all the doors on the AAU with curtains, make it easy for you army lot.”  

“Or beads,” Bernie took one look at her co-worker’s frankly rather blank expression before elaborating “You know the kind that fortune tellers are supposed to have.”

“Campbell and Wolfe… Not quite a name for a pair of fortune tellers.”

“Not bad for a dodgy estate agent’s though.”

“A grand claim from a woman living out of a hotel room.”

“And you’ve been living in the same house for how long now?”

“Long enough to know where the kitchen cupboards are, thank you very much. Haven’t you got somewhere to be?”

The blonde didn’t even pretend to glance at her watch “No, I think you’ll find that I’m all yours,” Her eyebrows, blatantly refusing to remain stationary like toddler in an assembly hall, should’ve been a warning of the comment to come “ _ Any way you like.” _

Bernie barely had time to finish her sentence before having to duck to one side to dodge the projectile biros.

“If you’ll just stop flirting with anything and everything with a pulse long enough to-“

“That’s rich from the woman who I caught giving the new MRI scanner bedroom eyes yesterday.”

“That’s an outstanding piece of cutting-edge technology. A healthy appreciation of it makes me a pioneer! A progressive ward lead! You, on the other hand,” Serena armed herself with a third pen “Are just a big flirt.”

Bringing her hand over her chest, Bernie’s shock was about as convincing as Jason when he proclaimed that he was going to enter  _ world’s strongest man _ .

“I have no idea here you’re sourcing these scandalous accusations!”

“Well you flirt with-“

Her phone finished her sentence, blasting the Birdie song on full volume – a souvenir from the most recent visiting Fletchling that no one on a ward full of twenty-something trainee nurses seemed to be capable of fixing.

“Ten forty… Why did I set a.. Ah! Meeting with Hanssen. Sorry Bernie, you know what it’s like: things to do, beanpoles to see.”

Bernie bit the edge of her lip.

“Beanpoles?”

“Hanssen… I’ll explain later.”

…

Arriving at Hanssen’s office to an open door, Serena didn’t wait for permission before strolling in, shoulder’s back, brain already half way to putting together a flirtatious quip. Who knows, she might even manage to make the old sod smile when he’s trying to axe her ward.

“So… Have you called me here to beg lie and cheat me back into the board room or are you first missing my pretty little face around here?”

She didn’t expect a laugh but his emotionless statue of a face  _ was  _ slightly insulting.

“Ms Campbell, as I’m sure you’re probably already aware – despite the evidence pointing to the contrary – this matter is of a purely professional concern.”

Rolling her eyes, she threw herself back into the nearest sofa. For all it’s not-quite-IKEA price tag, it might as well have been bricks underneath the thin black leather. Hopefully something milling about up there would take mercy on her and let Bernie be around to sort her back out later.

“Come on then, out with it, how much of our funding are you trying to shave off?”

He took an audible breath, exhaling with a light hiss as he considered the end of his pen for a healthy half-minute before speaking,

“Actually, none. This matter is more… Directly linked with you in particular,” His voice changed, slipping up in volume as if he were addressing a crowd as opposed to the single woman sat no more than a few metres away “A fellow member of staff had risen concerns as to your mental state over the previous weeks. Obviously, I am not at liberty to disclose just who brought these matters to my attention – but I can tell you that she appeared to want to stress that her concerns are, predominantly, on a personal level and that no action should be taken in terms of reviewing your right to practice unless we feel you are an immediate danger to the safety and, or, wellbeing of your patients.”

Serena bold upright, lips slightly parted and expression unchanged from the words ‘mental state onwards’.

_ An immediate danger to the safety and wellbeing of your patients. _

Throat feeling as if it’s been peeled raw, it was painful to swallow but she did regardless, once, twice, three times, before finally coaxing out a reply,

“After all we’ve been through… She still believes me to be incompetent?”

“Now, now, Ms Campbell, I do believe that you’ll find that I said she  _ expressly  _ requested that her concerns did not go on to affect your professional standing at this hospital. As far as any professional or governing body is concerned, this conversation will never have happened.”

Slowly, she ground her teeth together. Whether the steady creaking of teeth under pressure was something she heard or something she’d felt, she still hadn’t decided.

She took a deep breath in through her nose, counting off the moments when the ward seemed to stop, granting them a strange, open privacy in which they were able to exchange a smile or a wink or a feather-light touch over crisp blue scrubs. All their moments, sacred as the scent of sunlight on the first warm day of spring.

_ Sacred _ , she’d thought.

_ And now Bernie goes and does this. _

“I suppose that you’re also not allowed to disclose just where little miss high-and-mighty got the impression that I’m suddenly incapable of heading a successful ward as I have been doing for the last decade – or does procedure not have a  _ shred _ of pity for those who really should’ve known better than to trust two-faced back-stabbers who it seems will stop at nothing to get in full control of their ward.”

“Ms Campbell,”

Looking up, she found Hanssen with his usual poker-face, long, wiry fingers constructed in a pyramid in front of him.

“Don’t you think you’re being a little harsh on your colleague? She simply raised a concern after watching you freeze during a routine surgical procedure at the beginning of last week and had since shared her worried about the validity and reliability of your short-term memory. Once again, I would like to assure you that these claims have not and will not go any further. However, I do feel it may be beneficial to have you complete a psychiatric assessment, just to be safe.”

“Memory,” She repeated, no longer in the sparse, quiet office but her own solitary stream of reality, watching warped flashbacks as they came in tidal waves, licking and retreating and crashing over and over and all at once: the weight of a limp hand by yet another bedside, the glaze over her mother’s eyes as her brain brewed a thunderstorm and all orchestrated to the wind, a constant, stuttering ‘ _ who are you? _ ’ in the voice that should’ve sang lullabies or fairy-tales or tearful goodbyes on the first day of school.

_ Drowning _ . That was the word, she was drowning.

“You think I have–“

Stagnant, the A-word reeked as rotting fish cages left to bake on the pier.

At least the man had the basic human dignity to look her in the eye when he answered,

“When a parent is positively identified as carrying the familial gene, their offspring have a fifty percent chance of inheriting and, consequently, developing the condition themselves. Ms Campbell, with your symptoms as they are… The odds do not appear to be in your favour.”


	4. Chapter 4

_AAU Consultancy office_

Under intense white light, the letters sheened from their cheap chrome plaque.

_Ms S. Campbell, Ms B. Wolfe_

Serena couldn’t be certain when she’d arrived there, nor when she’d begun staring through the glass door panel into the office she shared.  Her heart didn’t so much beat as shiver yet the muscles deep in the tissues of her legs continued to contract and relax and contract and relax in an involuntary, jittering spasm as if, even on a cellular level, her body were still screaming to flee.

One hand curled around the door handle. Even through a layer of thick, hot sweat, it felt cold, firm, almost too real, too definite, to belong in that distorted daydream of a ‘ _what if?_ ’

 _And yet here she was_.

A low, metallic groan. The door opened.

The woman, the blonde woman, the woman with a name like the first breath out of water – she either couldn’t remember it or didn’t want to.

But for now, Serena decided, ‘the woman’ would do. The definite article is oddly fitting for the thing trying to dismantle your life.

“Have I done something to offend you?” Asked Serena, pushing the door shut.

The woman looked up but her eyes remained fixed down.

“Or is it your usual practice to rise to power by _personally_ destroying your opposition by any means necessary?”

“Serena, I-”

“You know, it’s almost as if you don’t understand that this could cost me everything,” She laughed. Nothing was funny “And you know what the best thing is? That yesterday, if you’d asked for the position, I would’ve done _anything_ in my power to give it to you,” Her voice flat-lined – somehow, it was worse “Anything.”

The organiser was exactly as she’d left it. Holding it by the back cover, the weight was numb, textureless. She allowed it to slip from the ends of her fingers and drop into the waste-paper basket.

…

The gearstick shuddered under her hand as the vehicle lurched forward on the empty road.

Home. She needed to get home.

Home to a blanket and crap telly and enough Shiraz to fall down, pissed or asleep or comatosed – she was finding it difficult to care which.

With the screeching complaint of rubber on fresh tarmac, the car flung itself into her driveway.

There could’ve only been a handful of steps between the car and her front door, three, four at the most, barely enough time for Serena to pull her cardigan tighter across her chest before she was slotting the key into the lock and finally, taking a long breath of cold air that tasted inexplicitly of _night_ and damp earth, stepping inside.

“Aunty Serena!”

The voice was just as it always was: loud, somewhat shrill and yet, somehow, comforting. And, sure enough, it wasn’t much more than a couple of second later when it’s owner appeared, just as he always did, clamouring over to the top of the landing like a bucket of over-excitable puppies, grin intact.

Except, unlike what always followed, this time he was trailed by a girl.

Tip-toing across the carpet to silently take his hand, she appeared in such a contrast to her nephew that it took Serena a moment to acknowledge she was even there.

“This is Celia, you treated her in your hospital, aunty Bernie said you had to cut her open to fix her insides, do you remember?” 

“Jason,” Serena began, in a voice far chirpier than the situation deserved and served with a smile that took physical effort to maintain “Would you mind if I had a word with you in the dining room a second? Alone, if you could?”

If he noticed her chance in tone, he chose not to acknowledge it. The only reaction she seemed to get was from the girl, Celia, apparently, who sank further back into Jason’s shadow, bowing her head so that her tea-brown hair would fall in the way of her face. 

“But we hadn’t finished our documentary!”

“Jason, now,” She’d given up on the worn down stub of patience she had left, physically feeling it as it melted away like the wax at the end of a candle-stick.  

“No. That’s not how it works! If I spent an estimated five minute talking to you because you want to lecture me on something then our documentary won’t finish until five past ten so then I won’t be able to get my eight hours sleep and I’ll just be tired all day tomorrow, making that a bad day as well!”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Jason! I’ve had a _very_ long day at work and you know what? Quite frankly, I couldn’t give a damn about your precious schedule that’s been ruling my life since the moment you moved in here now could you _please_ just act like a normal, functioning human being for once, and get down these stairs before I have to come up there!”

He stared for a flat half-minute.

“You claim to be so different, looking after me – but you’re all the same, you all keep lying, just like Lola did. ”

Serena gritted her jaw, her entire head tilting in jagged, almost mechanic movements.

“Don’t you dare compare me to that stupid little excuse for a girlfriend.”

Jason blinked, completely unfazed. Behind him, the girl’s face had turned a blotchy shade of grapefruit-red, sniffling or shaking, it was difficult to tell. He encouraged her closer to his side.

“Look, now you’re upsetting her. She has anxiety; she doesn’t like it when people shout.”

“Yes, I can see that-”

“We’re going to go and finish our documentary now, goodnight, Aunty Serena.”

“That’s it,” With her key still in her fist, Serena only had to turn around to unlock the front door. Cold air met her skin, tingling like antiseptic on a wound. It felt good. “Make your own breakfast.”

The footsteps from upstairs stopped.

“But where are you going?”

“Out.”

A single, precise syllable, the word was delivered the same sharp edge as the slamming of the front door as she disappeared just out of the reach of copper-yellow street lamps and away, to anywhere, so long as that place happened to be far, _far_ away in the cold, damp autumn night.

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hiya, just a few of PSA's:
> 
> Firstly, I really do need to thank all of you really, really lovely people for your comments! They certainly help brighten up my day X 
> 
> Secondly, I'd just like to put it out there that I'm changing the tags as the story goes along - so things such as trigger warnings are being added to as new content is uploaded. 
> 
> Also, this chapter has a warning for suicidal thoughts/tendencies.

“Ah, Hello, Mr Knolls, we’ve just had your test results back and I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news but you have a grand total of absolutely zero things wrong with you. Symptoms to be expected include your usual bright,  _ warm _ , demeanour and a tragic prognosis of a long and happy life,” Sarcasm dripped from Serena’s voice like stale grease. She paused long enough to present him with a clipboard, pointing at the dotted line at the foot of the first form, still warm from the printer “Now, if you could please sign to say that you consent to discharge do that we can free up this bed for those less tragically unfortunate than yourself – say the teenager waiting in A&E with a suspected internal bleed threatening to cause life-long brain damage.”

“But- But-” The frantic opening and closing of his wrinkled, distinctly oval-shaped jaw caused the drooping layers of neck-skin to wobble. The overall effect, Serena noted, wasn’t dissimilar to a tortoise trying to grasp a shred of lettuce between it’s great gummy lips “But what about the pain! The dislocations! Something’s always been not right – I know it!”

The pitch of his wailing travelled far, quickly putting him front-and-centre of daytime entertainment for half of the ward and something to moan about for the other. And, of course, because the morning hadn’t gone tits-up enough already, among the watching spectators, just  _ had  _ to be Bernie.

“Mr Knolls, if you could  _ please  _ just keep your voice down for a moment – you‘re distressing the other patients.”

In two swift motions, Serena drew the paper curtains, giving them an illusion of visual privacy, at least.

“Now,” She began firmly, “I understand that your current physical condition may be troubling you but I, with the complete backing of my team, can absolutely and categorically assure you that this is entirely psychological. You have depression, Mr Knolls, these things are never easy. As for the dislocations to your wrist, I’m afraid these things do happen more frequently as you get older. And, whilst you do have my  _ deepest  _ apologies that I can’t help you, there’s simply no sense in giving you a bed when there’s people waiting in this hospital who simply need it more – and that’s not even mentioning the tests, my time, the pain relief-”

“No! I need that! Surely there’s another test that you haven’t ran yet, please, I’m beggin’ ya,” His voice crept higher and higher, like an elastic band being slowly stretched thin “Can’t you see I’m in agony? You can’t leave me here, like this!”

Serena did her best to look apologetic.

“I’m afraid we have to, if we’re going to use this bed for someone who really needs it.”

“But I do need it! I demand another doctor – the pretty blonde lass who sorted my meds out yesterday, she’ll do.”

Serena gripped the metal bar at the end of the bed. Electric blue, the veins stood out like crayon on white-washed walls against the translucent eggshell white of her knuckles.

“I am your doctor, Mr Knolls, if you have problem with that than I’m sure I could ready the relevant paperwork for you to make a formal complaint. In the meantime, I’ll leave the discharge forms with you; I’ll be back in half an hour and believe you me, I want them completed.”

“Ms Campbell?”

Serena hadn’t noticed the deep navy person-shaped shadow (she’d have sworn there was a word for that) until it burst through the certain, file in one hand and a paper cup in the other,

“Serena – ”

It was as far as she got before the man practically leaped up in bed to greet her,

“A proper doctor! Finally!”

The comment barely deserved the eye-roll it was given.

“Oh, don’t you start,” She muttered under her breath before saying, louder, to Bernie “Ms Wolfe, if you could enlighten me as to what I owe the  _ pleasure  _ of your company?”

“I saw that you’ve prepared Mr Knoll’s discharge forms.”

“Yes,” She replied curtly, before her patient could start up again with his sales pitch “Because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with him. However, if you’re that intent on continuing this conversation, my office would be a more appropriate location, don’t you think?”

Following along behind her, the only thing Bernie said was a meek ‘thank you’ as she took the office door.

“What’s this really about?” Asked Serena as soon as the latch clicked shut. Bernie’s moping face had gotten old quickly.

“I… Ummm… I got you a coffee, full fat latte,” She held out the cup and it took all of Serena’s willpower not to tear off the lid and launch the contents directly into her smug little face.

“How about we keep the chit-chat to our patients from now on, hmmm? Might work out better for both of us.”

“Serena –”

Her name in that voice still tasted like Shiraz and warm blankets and crap late-night telly and despite everything, Serena flinched.

“It’s Ms Campbell, if you would, what was it you wanted to say to me in relation to my patient?”

The cheap, yellow lighting in the office combined with the pale pigment of her skin to make the rim around her eyes reflect almost candyfloss pink as she frowned, blinking.

Either that or the woman had a hangover.

“I just thought  - well, I presumed, really, that we were going to keep Mr Knolls in under observation for a couple of days, until we can be sure that his symptoms are placebo.”

“Whilst we have,  _ multiple _ , blunt force trauma patients downstairs needing bed we don’t have? As the  _ original  _ ward lead and former CEO of this hospital, I say that he’s getting discharged today, end of.”

“Trauma patients? S-”

“Ms Campbell.”

“Sorry, Ms Campbell – but it’s the first I’ve heard of this. Why wasn’t I notified?”

“Well maybe,” She didn’t so much pace about her office, but glide “The red phone rang when you were too busy sneaking off on your little unsolicited coffee break.”

She was treated to Bernie’s direct, yet oddly blank, glare,

“You mean you don’t remember?”

The last time Serena’d questioned the origins of a sticky-note reminder in own handwriting, she’d still been marching up and down the wards in ridiculous red stilettos,

“No, I mean that I was busy with the administration duties that you seemed to have overlooked. In case you haven’t noticed,  _ Ms Wolfe _ , you’re not actually in the army anymore – you can’t just keep patients in or rip them open because you’ve got a gut feeling that they’ve picked up some obscure foreign disease that no-one but you seems to have heard of. We have procedures here, rules, respect for God’s sake! Now if you could please just-” She stuttered- “Get out of my office before I go to Hanssen and advise that your little ego politics would be better spent elsewhere.”

Serena stepped back before Bernie’s outstretched hand could touch her face.

Arm still hanging limp in the air, she tilted her face, mouth twitching but never quite closing,

“I’m only doing this because I care.”

_ Nice try _ .

Serena took a long, slow breath.

“I assure you the candour is not reciprocated. If you could please close the door on your way out: some of us have work to do. Uninterrupted.”  

Looking directly into Bernie’s face, she wasn’t sure how she’d classify what came next; anger; hurt; betrayal; none of words she grasped for seemed to fit quite right. All she could say was that that face of pure–

That was a face that you never quite forget.

“I see,” The last word was too high for Bernie’s voice “…Fair enough.”

The blonde’s eyes met hers for half a second, a quarter, perhaps, before falling back down as she swallowed.

Under a different circumstance, Serena would’ve almost said that the woman looked timid as she backed away, reaching behind her for the door handle. It was as if her figure had drawn back into itself. With something resembling a pit fall deep in her stomach, she realised that the blonde, who walked like she’d fight the world and win, could only have been a handful of centimetres taller than she was.

“Bernie-”

It was too late and, with a glimpse of blue scrubs, she was gone.

Serena sat down in the empty office before taking a sip from the cup abandoned on her otherwise immaculate desk.

Latte, two sugars,  _ exactly the way she liked it. _

…

“Mr Di Luccia,” Began Serena, staring at the deserted bed at the foot of her ward “Care to explain why you decided to discharge Mr Knolls without first informing me?”

“What?” He said, before Fletch could elaborate for him,

“We… Erm… We didn’t, boss. You see, Bernie said we were going to keep him in, see what he does.”

“Yes? Well, Ms Wolfe can go and do one with a cactus for all I care – he’s my patient, not Ms Wolfe’s – now  _ where is he _ ?”

The two men looked at each other but didn’t say anything.

“ _ Well _ ?”

In the end, Fletch took the fall.

“I think he went up that corridor that leads down to Nightingale, you know the one that goes via the supply cupboard opposite the roof?”

“You’re not,  _ seriously _ , telling me that you allowed a patient in a  _ very  _ vulnerable emotional state go swanning off to the top of a building that’s just over four stories high?”

“Well, in all fairness, they do have a keep out sign up there.”

“Somehow,” Her mouth barely moved as she produced the sound in a low, gritty whisper, “I don’t think that’s going to stop him.”

The three exchanged a look that passed from Serena to Raf to Fletch and lingered there a moment, before all three medics simultaneously turned towards the corridor and ran.

…

The corridors were short but identical, the same peeling yellow paint and grey tiles twisting across the fourth floor like a hedge-maze, it’s centre set of rusting metal stairs that lead to roof.

“If he sees us all running out, he’ll panic,” Said Serena, one hand holding the fire-door slightly ajar “He’s my patient, let me talk to him first – I’ll shout if I need you.”

Without waiting for the slightly stunned nods from her colleagues, she persuaded the clunky metal door open wide enough to slip through.

The first thing Serena noticed, stepping out onto the roof, was the wind. Bitter, it was the kind that seeps deep into your sensory neurons, leaving the ends of your fingers dancing for warmth.

The second thing she noticed was the man.

He was still in his paper gown, even from the other side of the building, she could make out the pastel blue. He’d be at risk of hypothermia if nothing else.

“Mr Knolls!”

The blue didn’t answer. She hadn’t expected it to.

She continued through the gravel. Crunching, her heel sunk a little deeper with every step. She walked faster.

And suddenly, she as close. Close. So close to the edge, it beckoned to her heart, it throbbed, to her lungs, she couldn’t breathe, to her feet, she kept walking.

A thought came. Something to do with….  _ Blue _ .

She couldn’t remember.

Another crunch, another step.  Stuck in a loop, coming closer and closer and closer and closer –

Something clicked. Heel on stone.

She’d ran out of gravel.

The ground was close now, with it’s boxy toy-train ambulances and doll-house people all busy, with forms to sign and meetings to attend. They rushed about like mayflies, with their short, busy lives.

Exempt from it all, Serena watched, like a child on the other side of a microscope, itching to reach and –

Then, there was a hand, firm on her wrist. It dragged her back – back to the gravel, back to the forms and the meetings, back to frantic buzz of  _ busy. _

_ Busy. _

_ Busy. _

“Trust me, you really don’t wanna be doing that, love.”   


	6. Chapter 6

 

Even through the hideous, baggy grey jumper that Fletch had bundled her into within moments of being dragged back into the hospital, Serena was shivering. It was September, for God’s sake, and yet the temperature had already began to tiptoe lower as the rest of the county desperately tried to cling to the last dregs of summer. Even she had had to admit defeat eventually and begrudgingly carry a cardigan.

Yet, for all the weather’s stereotypical English-ness, Serena was almost grateful to be there to experience it tonight. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen, properly looked at, the stars. On a night when the sky was a fixed, inky black and the stars dots of sparkling spun silver, it was like art. 

For what could’ve been the twelfth time that evening, she counted off the constellations,

“Orion… Taurus... Ariga…”

“Never took you for a star gazer,”

_ Bernie _ . 

Under the circumstances, Serena could forgive herself for being surprised. 

“My father taught me them, long time ago now, mind you,” Her words floated away in faint wisps of grey mist. 

“Hmmm…” 

They stayed there, Bernie stood over the bench where Serena sat, vacuum-sealed in the atmospherical equivalent of a pan left to boil itself dry. 

Bernie looked to Serena to the stars then back to Serena.

“Hanssen told me about what happened on the roof.”

“Oh really?” Serena stared down the constellation just west of Bernie’s left shoulder, “And what was that then? That I tried to flung myself from the roof? I’m surprised the old Swede’s not got it in his head that I tried to bring a patient down with me. God knows the rumour’s bound to be floating around this place somewhere.” 

“No,” Bernie lay her hands over her shivering fists. It was almost shameful how quickly they unravelled, exposing her palms to the warmth “But he told me that you were really too close to edge for us not to be concerned at least. You want to know what I think Serena?” It was the blonde’s turn to let her eyes flutter up to the sky “I think that you’re the strongest, most persevering woman I’ve ever met. So much so that I let myself become so absorbed in my own mess of a life that it never even crossed my mind how you might be suffering. This isn’t my strong suite, believe me, but I want to help you, if you’ll let me?” 

Serena took a long, slow breath through her thick fleece. Inside, it was warm and soft and the air tasted like the moment when you’re baking a cake and open the oven door with your face slightly too close: vanilla and milk and steam. 

“Serena?”

Her head followed the sound and sure enough, there were those swollen brown eyes staring back. 

There was a pause, a break, when even the ambulance bay seemed to sit in silent suspense. 

“Have you ever considered the notion that I don’t want you here? That you’re the root cause of all this? After all,” She laughed, a hollow, empty sound “My life was fine before you came along, sticking your nose in it.”

“I’d withdraw my complaint, I’ll transfer wards, heck - I’d resign if you wanted me to, get out of your way for good. Just, please, promise me that you’ll never try anything like that again, or that you’ll talk to someone at least.” 

There it was: the moment that Serena cracked, the first gasping breath like a diver coming up for air.  Numb, she let herself be pulled closer towards the warmth, cradled against Bernie’s chest. She smelt…  _ soft _ , like the hoodie -  _ should’ve bloody known _ . 

“I-” Even as it began, she wasn’t sure that she trusted herself to know for certain where that sentence would end. 

“Shhhh…” Serena felt the sound every bit as much as she heard it, gentle vibrations tingling against the tip of her forehead. 

Perhaps one of them should’ve pulled away, spoken eye-to-eye with the hospital in the background to remind them just who and where they were. Neither did. 

“It’s okay, you don’t have to explain if you don’t want to.” 

“I-” She closed her eyes. The wind’s high-pitched wail was still there, ringing somewhere behind her ears, “I wasn’t… Going to do anything. Not consciously, anyway. I’m okay, really,” 

Serena waited for the argument, the worry, the  _ pity _ . What she received was a kiss, warm and so soft that it could’ve been a warm breeze that brushed against her forehead. When Bernie drew back, her cheeks were damp, sparkling.  _ There really was something to be said for starlight _ . 

“I think we could both do good from a walk, yes?”

Serena didn’t answer, she doubted that Bernie had expected her to; there was no need for conversation. Instead, she let herself be pulled her to her feet, have the contact with one hand coaxed away as Bernie lead her with the other. 

They walked like that, in voluntary silence, communicating through the brief brushing of shoulders or firm squeezes through the conjoined thread of their fingers. Occasionally, Bernie would walk a couple of paces ahead, the gold of dimmed streetlights shimmering on her skin. Serena would never realise that she was staring until she’s caught and acknowledged with a whisper of a smile. On another night, they might’ve stepped closer, watched thin slips of breath fade away with their excuses and given in. But, as it was, with their heavy limbs and drying eyes, it was enough to squeeze her hand as they both looked away. 

Going by the position of the stars, it was roughly an hour later when Bernie’s pager eventually eased them apart. Even then, Serena silently insisted on walking her back, hand in hand as if it were the most natural thing in the world. 

“So I suppose this is goodnight,” Said Bernie, when they’d been stood by the entrance long enough to look dangerously like lingering. 

“Or you could come back to mine, later… I mean, If you- If you’d-” 

“Want to?”

“Yes, that-” Serena gestured with both hands- “You know for… Tea... Or… Something?”

“Only, only if you’re sure I wouldn’t-” 

“Intrude? Never. If anything it’ll be nice to have another…  _ woman _ around to talk to. I, I mean you even stay the… night… If you wanted to. I’ve got the spare room, if you don’t fancy the whole… driving.” 

“And Jason?”

“He won’t mind, I promise.”

“I suppose that’s that then,” Serena would’ve put the awkward gravitation of Bernie’s shoulder’s down to her own imagination if it hadn’t been for her suddenly recoiling back a moment later, as if someone had tugged at a string tied to the back of her neck. 

“See you later,” 

Blinking as if she’d got something caught in her eye, Bernie looked almost drunk as she stumbled away. 

Ten minutes later and Serena still wondering what on Earth had just happened. 


	7. Chapter 7

 

The drive was easy: between the stereo and the road, barely illuminated by the stretch of blinking streetlights, thinking wasn’t really an option.

Home was a different story.

The radio had been promptly shut off ( _There really was a time and a place for ‘Late night club floor-fillers’. This, Serena decided, ripping the plug from its socket two lines into ‘I kissed a girl’, wasn’t one of them_ ) and, hidden away at the bottom of a cul-de-sac with a Zimmer frame to person ratio that could challenge most of the care homes in Holby, the only noise leaking in from the street was a low buzzing of streetlamps. What she wouldn’t have given for a crappy Toyota full of drunken teenagers to yell at.

Serena halted mid-pace around her kitchen. This was ridiculous. She was a grown woman, for God’s sake, not a brooding teenager.

The solution was a simple one.

Within less than half an hour, the last sip of her second glass slipped down her throat as easy as if it’d been water.

Another.

Liquid sloshed against the aubergine glass. The bottle’s lighter than it should be, she catches herself thinking, before remembering that it doesn’t matter. Not tonight.  

Off by a millimetre, purple-red spilled out onto the counter-top, expanding out like blood across slab white marble, corpse cold to the touch. She should clean it up. It’ll stain soon. The kitchen roll holder was just there. How difficult would it be to reach out, to do her job and fix it, make it all better. Ten seconds and it’d all be-

The first drop rolled descended down the cream cupboard door like a raindrop on a car window, before finally letting go, dropping down onto kitchen tile with a drip she’d probably imagined and Serena stood there, absolutely frozen, as if there was nothing in the whole wide world that she could do about it.

Perhaps the jostle of the lock should’ve brought her back, like the focus of a film camera, made time work outside of the constant _drip._

_Drip_

_Drip._

Footsteps, there are footsteps now and she should move, she should really, _really_ move. Soon she’ll need excuses and reasons and how do you explain this feeling to the woman who was put back together from blown up bits of body by the side of the road and still wades into theatre with a smirk on her lips? How do you tell her that this bottle of wine- _this goddamn bottle of wine_ -

“Serena?”

The voice comes with a hand between her shoulder blades and Serena thinks it’s the first time she’s breathed out all day.

“How about we go into the living room? We can fix this later, Hmm?”

She knows that Bernie’s not really asking for approval but she nods anyway. It does something to minimise the feeling of being lead away like a tantruming toddler.

The living room is still pitch black, a stark reminder of the hour outside. It had to be morning, what was the time they said on the radio? Ten past- no. Quarter to- no.

A lamp flickered on. The room glowed, washing a brass-gold lense over a predictable pallet of brown, gold, red.

By unspoken arrangement, they both gravitated towards the sofa.

“H-How was the operation?” Ventured Serena, instantly regretting taking out her frustrations on the radio. Even Katy Perry couldn’t be much worse than this, “You’re back soon.”  
Another silence. She watched Bernie’s eyes wander around the room as if she were tracing the flight path of a fly with nowhere to land.

“I didn’t do it. Hanssen was already scrubbed in when I got there, stared me down into going home.”

“Couldn’t have been that good of a stare.”

“What?”

“Because you came back here.”

“Ah, yes,” She took a deep breath in, then out again. It looked painful, “I suppose that was a… Mistake of wording on my part... If you- if don’t want me here then I could… Go… I just thought- because of what… Happened… Earlier.”

With a combination of liquid courage and good, old fashioned, _nothing to lose_ numbing her upper-brain’s buzz of self-restraint, Serena bit the bullet down hard,

“Why’re you really here, Bernie?”

“Because I think I owe you an explanation…” She stared up at the crevice where the ceiling met a coffee-brown wall, lamp light splayed across her neck in a series of shadows and highlights that Serena was certain would taste like liquid honey “I told Hanssen because…” The light moved with the ligaments in her neck, one long continuation of gold streaming from the crown of her curls down to where her skin dipped underneath white cotton “I told Hanssen because I was worried about you, and because I knew that if I didn’t, eventually, someone else would. I hope that this is nothing and you come back on Monday and hold this against me until I’ve bought you enough coffee and cinnamon swirls to feed the entirety of the AAU for a week-”

“And if it’s not?”

“Then let’s cross that bridge if it comes to it, yes?”

Serena just about managed a mute nod. _Cross that bridge if it comes to it_.

“Serena… About this evening, on the rooftop-”

“I remember,” The damned shake returns at the back of her throat.

“I know I said that you don’t owe me any explanations - and you don’t - but that doesn’t mean that I’m not here if you need to say it to a friendly face. Talking it through used to do wonders for people out in the field.”

“But I’m not _out in the field_ , I’m here, in the best position I’ve ever been in. No one’s… shooting at me or telling me what to do and yet _one mention_ of that bloody-” Serena’s fingers tied nooses around her own hands, a marble of rash-red and anaemic yellow. She couldn’t decide if they were still shaking.

“Hey...Hey…” With the same coo that she’d heard Bernie use to quiet a shrieking new-born, Bernie put a hand not over the ones in Serena’s lap as she’d been expecting, but on her opposite shoulder. In one, pathetic breath, Serena let herself be coaxed closer, until her head was on Bernie’s chest, snatching half lungfuls of perfume before throwing them out in damp breaths to the rhythm of a slow, steady heartbeat.

_In._

_Out._

_One._

_Two._

_Three._  

“How about we put the telly on?”

The suggestion is gentle, with the same careful, foggy warmth that’d hung around Bernie like an aura.

 _Come dine with me_ buzzes on.

The programme is awkward, predictable but, at God-knows-what-time in the morning with strong wine numbing her system, it didn’t need to be anything else. An eton’s mess, two obligatory arrogant twats and countless sevens later and Serena’s barely noticed the forty-five minutes that slipped by. It feels good, she decides, to remember how to lose track of time.  

They left the television running, one episode bleeding into the next. She shuffles backwards at the beginning of the first advert break, tipping her head back, eyes rested shut.

“I thought you were asleep.”

They exchange a smile, flowing as a fluid from one pair of lips to another.

They’re both fast asleep by dessert.


	8. Chapter 8

“Come on then, Henrik,” Said Serena, draining her second cup of coffee and getting really rather bored of disjointed small talk about the misfortunes of St. James’s A&E, “What’s all this about?”  

“Ms Campbell,” He shifted slightly as he pulled his jacket cuff back down to conceal just past his wrist “I feel obliged to, _personally_ , inform you that you’re… _test_ results have returned from the labs, which, in conjunction with the assessment that we discussed last time we spoke, should give us a fairly conclusive verdict on the _current predicament_ -” The envelope that he produced next was so clinically white that it almost glowed. Ward lighting came to mind.

Sometimes, Serena wondered whether Hanssen had ever actually encountered dust or if it too was intimidated into order like the row of identically space pencils at the base of his desk. _A well-ordered production line_. No- no- that was- that was something else. What was it that Hanssen called the hospital once? It was a _well-something-ed something_ , anyway

“Ms Campbell?”

He was holding the envelope in her face now, holding a typically smug lift of the eyebrows.

 _Well_ , she thought, turning her head as she took up an identical expression, eyeing the nearest edge of the paper. The corner was blunt where the crisp card had been squashed into a splitting of soft fibres, like fur. _Two can play that game_.

“Present and correct.”

“I was simply going to ask if you’d rather some privacy in which to open the results. I can only imagine how this must be a matter of some sensitivity. I could page Ms Wolfe if you’re in need of moral support.”

She did a double take of the envelope before taking it with two fingers, cautiously; as if she were afraid it might bite.

“I don’t follow.”

“Then would you care to elaborate? I have many talents but I’m afraid mind reading isn’t yet one of them.”

“Why would I need Ms Wolfe to open a set of test results?”

“I simply thought her presence might have its uses, under these… _difficult_ circumstances.”

“I’m not a child, Henrik,” She replied flatly, before he could come up with another string of words that meant absolutely _nothing_ , “I’m capable of doing this by myself.”   

It was almost disconcerting, how quietly he rose from his probably over-priced leather chair.

“Very well, then.”

\---

The clock ticked and the Earth span and there, at the foot of the labyrinth of letters jumbled together to make no sense, sat the word.

_Alzheimer's._

She had Alzheimer's.

\---

Perhaps, Serena mused, this was where she was supposed to race home, surge into Bernie’s undoubtedly open arms and sob, sob until it felt like the tears were ripping her chest apart and nothing made sense.

But, no, four hours later, having finished her shift and returned, a sainsbury's carrier bag in each hand, she poured herself a glass of wine, white this time and did what any sensible British woman would do in her situation: she put on a box set of Downton Abbey. Of course, that wasn’t to say that Bernie didn’t turn up, damp from the rainfall and looking rather like a puppy that’s just torn up the throw cushions but it was four episodes until the subject of the _A-word_ was even mentioned:

“So,” Began Bernie, voice only just louder than the music layered over the credits, “How did it go with Hanssen this afternoon?”

Beaming, Serena learnt there and then that actions were better than words, especially when that action happens to be slipping her palm over warm, soft skin belonging to Bernie’s jaw, thumb tracing her jaw like an artist softens the lines in a charcoal sketch.

"Safe and sound."

“In which case, I think we deserve to let our hair down.”

And, for the two weeks that followed, that was exactly what they did.

The cottage that they arrived to was so close to the water that even the silences sound like the distant hum of tide. Two mugs of slightly over-stewed tea later, they unlock the pedal bikes left chained to the rusting old fence around the side. There’s something timeless about the morning bike rides, with Serena in front and Bernie a wheel’s width behind. ‘ _So I don’t leave you behind_ ’, Bernie had said the first time they’d set off. Glancing back over her shoulder to find her riding partner hobbling along the quay at approximately four miles an hour, jerking the handle bars in every which direction, Serena almost restrains from commenting.

Almost.

”Everything alright back there?”

She can almost _hear_ Bernie gritting her teeth.

“Just admiring the view, dear.”

 _Something Berenice Wolfe isn’t good at,_ Mutters Serena to the tide, to the seagulls, to the sweet-shop paint pallet of postcard beach huts, it all goes by so quickly, _who’d have thought it?_

Then, as they turn off, away from the promenade, the thought dissolves, drifting away like the soft white clouds above.

_And, just this once, that’s completely okay._


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has a Trigger Warning for (attempted) suicide

The rest of the fortnight was frittered away on the usual things: taking Jason to the arcade to have _just one more go_ at the crane machines that Bernie _swore_ were rigged, eating honeycomb flavoured ice creams as they walk along the pier. They even had a go at the traditional McKinnie tackiest fridge magnet competition (Jason won with a flip-flop that was supposed to play the chorus to _Summer Holiday_ every time you opened the fridge. Even months later, Serena would uphold her claim of having absolutely _no idea_ what happened to the batteries that went missing two days after getting home.)

Then there were the not-so-usual things: like recording the name and description of waiter she’d be expected to remember the next day, like scrubbing at the layers of black ink on the back of her hand  - reminders of _why_ she’d walked into that room, like sobbing at two in the morning having forgotten the word for a _fucking_ 99 flake, a greying envelope crushed close to her chest.

That night, in a vacuum of sweat and salt and mucus, where her lungs magnetically repelled oxygen, where she really, _really_ needed to calm down now, where she was _dying, she had to be_ , where _would it really be so bad if she was-_

That was the night when Serena Campbell realised that it wasn’t just the Alzheimer's that’d began to rot her brain.    

The upside was silver lining, a voile against a rainstorm - but it was there and, as Serena discovered when Bernie padded into her room, before wordlessly slipping into bed beside her, sometimes commiserations are better than nothing.

“Bernie?” The ability to string together two syllables came out of nowhere but she’s grateful for it nonetheless.

“Shhhh,” The sound, breathed into the back of her neck, eased a long wisp of air hoarded somewhere deep in her lungs “Breathe in… Breathe out… You’re safe. I’ve got you now.”

“B- But the letter. With Hanssen, the letter-” Unable to hand it over yet too clumsy to rip it to shreds, Serena just shook.

“I know, I know. Hanssen told me.”

“What- why-”

“Because I knew that you’d tell me in your own time, when you are ready.”

“But Bernie- Alzheimer's?”

“It’s mild, they caught it early. We can treat this. You’re okay,” This time, Bernie’s voice came punctuated with a single, silent kiss on the back of her neck as two hands, worn down soft by a lifetime of sewing broken people back together, massaged over the scars on her back, “It’s all going to be okay.”

The next morning, Serena woke to a cup of tea and hot, buttered toast.

They never talk about it again.

Instead, they chose to talk about the important things: why microwave popcorn will always be superior to packaged, who should win the bake-off, whether it’s _really_ too late in the year to go swimming in the sea.

(Bernie does the latter anyway, stripping down to a black bra and lacy knickers, beckoning them in after her, surrounded by in glossy chrome waves that just lick the tops of her thighs like she belongs in the opening credits of a bloody bond film. Serena’s certain that she can feel the exact moment that her alveoli go on strike)

Then, it’s the end of September, end of two weeks of nothing. With Bernie and Jason already in the car, Serena didn’t want to leave them waiting too long when she pops back for a forgotten phone charger - but she did take the time to wander through one last time, touch each doorframe in turn and offer a silent ‘ _thank you_ ’ to the little cottage by the sea. _Funny how quickly some things begin to feel like home._

Later that night, Bernie was graced with a brief connection of lips under faint evening stars. _Yes_ , thought Serena, when those same lips fought back in an explosion of _warm_ and coconut lip butter, when her tongue finds refuge in that mouth. She grasped the lapels of her coat, unaware of being stepped backwards until she’s up against the hallway door. It’s the first sip of morning coffee, it’s the first buzz of sensory receptors after plunging into the cold September sea, it’s the sound of Bernie’s sigh, her mouth a perfect O as she rolled her own body against Serena’s. _Home_.   

The rest, really, was diffusion.

It began with slippers, a battered old pair with half-falling-apart insoles that molted a trail of fake wool wherever Bernie went. When they appeared, next to Serena’s silk pair at the foot of the wardrobe, it was a matter of time until the rest followed. Shirts. Leg razors. An oddly wide selection of knickers. Every time that Serena walked into a room, something of Bernie’s would’ve materialised since her last visit. Christmas came and went ( _the excuse to finally force Bernie to replace said slippers didn’t go amiss_ ) and, by January, Serena couldn’t remember the last time that the blonde had slept anywhere outside of her bed.

Sometimes, on those chilly nights spent with her face burrowed into Bernie’s shoulder, fingers weaved together at her waist, it was almost easy to pretend that this was _normal_.

Then, of course, like her own, personal IED, came the flyer:

 _For those affected by memory loss_.

The hall they arrived to the following Tuesday was nothing special. Wood floor. Four walls. Girl guide posters. Jam sandwiches. Around a coffee trolley stood the mass of people, most elderly, some not. All tired. At the edge of the group, a woman, with unbrushed hair the colour of a fifty pence piece, worked expertly on crumbling a digestive between her fingers, smearing the resulting mix of biscuit crumbs and chocolate across the faded fabric of her long, stained gown.

Serena hadn’t realised that she was holding a fist until Bernie covered it with her own, larger hand.

“Come on, let’s go and see if there’s any decent tea bags left.”

In short, there weren’t. The liquid in the polystyrene cup was almost orange - not helped by its hopeless stewing where it’d been abandoned on a window sill. The biscuit woman’s son, Alan? Stewart? Something like that, had offered to make her a new one. He had the same big, kind eyes as when he’d calmly prised the remaining crumbs from his mother’s fingers. Serena declined.

Later, one more person in a circle of slightly-too-small plastic chairs, she observed that no one drank the tea anyway, not really.

They weren’t there for pleasantries. They were there to talk. They were there to listen.

David. Short grey hair. Diagnosed two years ago. Alone.

Sylvia. Canadian war veteran. Caring for a wife without the faintest clue who she is. Alone.

Another woman, London manners and a quiet voice. Alone.

“My name is Serena Campbell-” She surveyed the room of strangers, smiling the way one does when one finds oneself in a room where every other coherent person knows exactly how you’re going to fall apart “Gosh this is very much like an AA meeting, isn’t it?” No one laughed - but one of the old ladies on the far side smiled, “I- well, I suppose this is where I tell you all that six months ago, I was diagnosed with Familial Alzheimer's disease. I’m currently caring for an adult with Asperger’s. Without my partner, Bernie, he’d already be back in care. Every day, I find that I can do less and-” Her eyes closed. _God, this was easier in her head_ \- “And it’s terrifying the life out of me.”

When she sat down, there was no applause, no trumpet from the heavens, no lightening bolt to strike her down, either. Instead, the woman to her left stood up and the next sad story began.

\---

Later that night, Serena made her decision.

\---

Keep your head up. Go to the kitchen. Step once. Step twice. Left. Right. Left. Right. Don’t think about Jason. Open the fridge. It’s cold. Stop. Cold is good. Find the bottle. Don’t think about Bernie. Open it. Two pills. Four. Six. Drink. Don’t think about them finding you. Drink. Don’t think about her holding you. Drink. Don’t think about him begging- _For God’s sake woman, just drink-_

If they feel like downing pebbles, good. Let them feel like something. Eight. Ten. Twelve. Drink. Let them hurt. Don’t worry about the crack of your kneecap on the tile. Drink. Who needs to stand anyway? Fourteen. Sixteen. Eighteen.

There’s footsteps, _God_ , footsteps.

_Clash. Crack. Click. Clash. Crack. Click._

Don’t run away. Drink. Don’t scream for help. Drink. _Over soon_. Drink.

_Drink._

Don’t let-

Don’t-

_Clash. Crack. Click. Clash. Crack. Click._

Close your eyes.

_One._

_Two._

_Three._

_Let them find you like this._

 

**_End of part 1_ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick note to give my eternal thank yous to theseventeenstairs (Snapegirl on here) for Beta-ing my incoherent rambles!


	10. Part Two - Bernie

_**Beginning of part 2** _

_ Four months earlier _

Bernie tapped her index finger on the steering wheel. It was almost unsettling how bright the dash lights shon in contrast. Six o'clock and already going dark.

  
Back to reality, she'd supposed.  
The vehicle drifted up into Serena's drive without any of the fuss of straightening up - there would be room for at least four cars on that icy tiling. They only had one.

  
Jason rushed ahead first, late for his programme (crime watch or autumn watch, Bernie wasn't sure which). But, untouched by the excitement of robins or serial killers (what was the difference, really?), the two of them waited behind, savouring the gentle tide of warm air circling from every angle.

  
Bernie closed her eyes, head tipped slightly back to realise a long, slow sigh from the bottom of her chest. Stay still much longer and she'd seriously be considering taking a nap just there, curled up in the front seat of Serena's little car.

  
As it was, she decided that the suitcases (well, a rucksack, two overnight bags and a shoe box - because 'these things cost me a fortune, I'm not having them looking like an old flip flop by the time we get there') really could wait until the morning.

  
"Serena?" She tried, with a gentle touch to her shoulder.

  
"Hmmm?"

  
"We're home."

  
"We?" Serena blinked, turning from the glittering dew-drops outside of her window as if they were a bad dream.  
Not for the first time, Bernie took a smaller hand in hers and held on tight.

  
"Yes, we."

  
Only later, when the routine touch of her lips was met with eyes like a sunset over water would Bernie realise just how little 'we' they might have left.

  
In the hours that followed, she might attempt to justify that it wasn't without a cold draft in her stomach that she let herself be dragged into bed. Kiss me, Serena had growled against the red raw skin of her earlobe, indented with teeth and tongue, touch me, fuck me against a bespoke mahogany door - it was her first time and she needed her now, eager, hungry, new.

  
First kiss.

  
First touch.

  
Bernie closed her eyes to the whisper of a memory, when two wine glasses were abandoned on a windowsill whilst two bodies rocked together with the rhythm of the tide as it came home to its rocks.  
Then Serena's teeth sunk into her neck and it all dissolved like a dream in the early morning.

  
She swallowed.

  
First time.

  
Now, with the dead weight of a body slowly breathing above her, Bernie hoped with every bitter, decaying plasma in her blood that next time, she'd have found the human decency to resist this.  
She'd had twice, two nights of perfume mixed with good, clean sweat. If this time, their night would be picked from every mundane moment that day, saved for days or weeks or, good God, months then that was how long she'd have. In that time, she would hold her, kiss her, fuck or make love depending on the shade of the glimmer in Serena's eyes but that was it.

  
And if that time had slipped away when she woke in the morning, then so be it.  
Either way, she promised the strung together memories of the woman above her that, there and then, there would be no more first times.

  
Serena was owed that much, at least.  
She saw the tabloid headline now, bold white letters screaming out from their glossy pink background in a dentist's waiting room: 'Dyke best friend abused my mentally ill mother on a peeling blue sandwich board outside of the newsagent, 'Vulnerable woman coerced into sex in latest trial'.

  
As the heavy hands dragged themselves along the clock face, it became a pastime of sorts, thinking line after line whilst she stared down crimson walls washed with nighttime grayscale, Serena mumbling dreams into six hundred thread Egyptian cotton.

  
Next came the faces, of Eleanor - sporting the same fuzzy brown hair and pink smile as she had next to her mother in the photograph in the hallway - those lips drawn into a thin line as narrow, hard eyes stared her down, 'I know what you did', they say, 'Mum might not - but I do'.

  
Then Raf and Fletch in their soft turquoise scrubs, all chatter dying away as she steps towards them. Silence. By unspoken agreement, they hurry each of the four children away. 'Why aren't we allowed to talk to auntie Bernie?' Mikey might ask, to be answered with a stiff glare. When they get home, they'll tell him and his sisters in hissing whispers about the dangers of messed-up people. None of the four Fletchlings ever ask after her again.

  
Her own children, Cam's arm around Charlotte's shoulders, 'Dad was right, you really are a monster'.

  
Nurses, porters, coffee shop ladies, the faces came quicker now, flashing one then another and another and were her eyelids open or closed, she couldn't remember, no light nor dark just faces, over and other, with their muttering and their spitting and their disgust-  
Serena woke her with a lip balm kiss on the forehead and Bernie could've sworn she heard the judge's hammer being thrown down.

  
Even the ceiling paint seemed to glare. It knew what she'd done.  
The night sweat under her arms was cold.

  
Fuck staying. Fuck Alzheimer's. Fuck six hundred thread Egyptian cotton. Fuck the cosmic joke. Fuck watching the person you love slowly falling apart.

  
Fuck it all.

  
She needed to get out of there.

  
She'd get dressed, write a note, change her phone number, the lock on the front door of her flat, leave Holby, leave the county, the country, disappear into the ether and wait for the memories of her to do the same.

  
The army still needed good field medics.

  
Maybe this time the IED would finish the job.

_ \--- _

She got as far as the doorway when the hum of a voice thick with sleep called after her,

“Where’re you going?” 

Perhaps then, had she kept her head down, said nothing as she jogged down the stairs, ran out of the door, left on the first bus that pulled into the station and became a hermit under a rock somewhere without Shiraz and beautiful women, she could've still saved this. 

But one look at Serena with eyes half-lidded and clumps of hair stuck to her face, and she was a goner. 

She stopped and stuttered out a reply with a smile that felt too little like defeat, 

“I'm just going to make us tea. Two sugars?” 

“One. Then then hurry back here, soldier, this bed isn't getting any warmer without you.” 

Bernie left with a kiss on Serena's forehead, 

“Okay.” 

_ \--- _

She stayed.

_ Then _  became  __ _Now_. 

Simple, really. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, I give my eternal thanks to theseventeeenstairs for being my lovely Beta!


End file.
